Koh Samui, Thailand's Upscale Transformation

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Some look in the Caribbean. Some search the South Pacific. Others
are convinced they’ll find it in the Maldives. Some believe it’s
off the coast of Brazil. Or perhaps the Seychelles—could it be
hiding in the Seychelles?

Me, I’ve focused my search on that cerulean-and-green expanse
between Indonesia and Indochina, where mangosteens thrive and
bamboo is the building material of choice. I’ve combed the
coastlines of the Andaman, Java, and South China Seas, hunting
for that elusive tropical paradise. Eighteen years ago, for one
brief moment, I actually thought I’d found it.

It was the dawn of the Glow Stick Era: late 1993. I was blazing
my way across Thailand — Chiang
Mai to Chiang
Rai, Bangkok
to the beach. The question was: which beach? There were so
many options, each with its own profile. Kayakers went to Ao
Phang Nga, snorkelers to Koh Phi Phi. (Koh means
island.) Hat Phra Nang was for cliff-divers; Koh Chang drew
the nature freaks. Phuket was firmly in the hands of
keg-standing lunkheads. Then there was Koh Pha Ngan. If you
wanted to skip a rope that was on fire or just freestyle at a
Full Moon Party, Pha Ngan was your place.

Alas, the moon was already on the wane as I rode down from
Bangkok to the coast—and besides, I was too old to skip rope. So
I wound up on a boat to Koh Samui.

Koh Samui had no profile, no real personality to speak of. But it
was by all accounts extremely pretty, with a jungle-draped
interior fringed by long, sandy beaches. From the ferry it
appeared as a dollop of brilliant green, frosted with creamy
white, afloat in a bowl of sapphire blue. I found a family-run
guesthouse on Chaweng Beach and stayed for a week, hardly
straying from the path between my bungalow and the sand.

It was no hotbed of culture—but then, most travelers would have
already had their dose of that up north. Koh Samui was their
beautiful reward: a relatively blank slate, defined as much by
what it lacked (glow sticks; lunkheads) as by what it had (killer
snorkeling; boat trips to a nearby marine park). Who needed
flaming jump ropes? Who needed “personality”? Samui was easy as a
summer’s day. It already drew plenty of tourists—yet on Chaweng
Beach in 1993, the incoming tide still seemed like a trickle.

The earliest modern-day visitors had arrived just a
quarter-century before, in the late sixties—“the First
Backpackers,” everyone calls them, as if they were talking about
the Pilgrims or Lewis & Clark. Given the landscape they
encountered, the comparison wasn’t so far off: Koh Samui back
then was still remarkably primitive. Roads were rough, where they
ran at all. The island’s main trade was in coconuts. There were
no proper hotels; those early vagabond explorers simply flopped
down in hammocks on the beach.

As word spread and more travelers arrived, hammocks were replaced
by two-buck guesthouses, which in turn gave way to ten-dollar
mini-hotels. A tiny airport finally opened in 1989, and soon
mini-hotels made room for maxi-resorts. Despite occasional
tensions between locals and tourists—like when some German
nudists were chased off a beach by a stick-wielding Thai
mob—Samui proved, on the whole, an accommodating host.

In 1993, Koh Samui had about 560,000 annual visitors. Today that
figure has nearly doubled: almost a million people a year, packed
onto an island only 13 miles wide. Scores of hotels now cover the
landscape, with increasing numbers on the luxury end. Samui’s
top-tier resorts—the Banyan Tree, the
W Retreat, and the
Four Seasons —rank among the finest in Southeast Asia.
InterContinental, Le Méridien, and Park Hyatt will soon join the
crowd.

The island’s evolution might be termed unlikely if it didn’t
seem, in hindsight, entirely obvious, maybe even preordained.
From day one, Samui was blessed with great bones and a sunny
disposition. That it would be plucked from obscurity—like some
future supermodel from a remote rural village—was, perhaps,
inevitable. What was not obvious was how dramatic its
transformation would be.

These days the average visitor stays only three nights on Koh
Samui, and will spend most of his time on the grounds of his
resort, lounging at the pool or on the beach, eating mangoes,
indulging in the occasional massage, and otherwise not doing very
much at all. Fortunately, Samui has some outstanding new places
at which to do (or not do) just that.

With teams using more than 100 unique apparatuses to launch globular projectiles a half-mile or more, the 27th annual World Championship Punkin Chunkin event is our pick as November’s Weird Festival of the Month.

The Banyan Tree, opened in July 2010, occupies a secluded
peninsula on the island’s southeastern coast, between Chaweng and
Lamai Beach. Its 88 villas are scattered along steep, terraced
hillsides that tumble down to a private cove; the highest sit 23
stories above the water. Buggies zip guests up and down
vertiginous paths to the beach, the spa, and the resort’s three
restaurants (don’t even consider walking home from breakfast).
Each villa has its own generously sized infinity pool—lapping at
your bedroom door—with views over the lush terrain, the small
beach, and the water beyond. There’s much to love about the
Banyan Tree: like waking to a Gulf of Thailand dawn and walking
10 paces from your bed straight into the pool. Or the easy
confidence of your butler—one for each villa—who arranges
everything from a half-caf latte to a diving excursion. Or the
way the gardeners momentarily stop grooming banana plants or
scything back undergrowth and instead smile broadly as you pass.
And, not least, the superb spa—where my indefatigable therapist
Ms. Wan fixed me a chilled lemongrass tea, then went at my back
like a sheet of packing bubbles. Best Thai massage I’ve had in
years.

But the real surprise was the W Retreat–Koh Samui, on the
island’s northern coast. I had not been, up to now, a W fan; I
found their cheekiness too programmed and their branding
overinsistent. (Why slap a logo on every surface, from the throw
pillows to the apples?) Name-dropping aside, the W Retreat won me
over. The setting is terrific—on an arrow-shaped headland with a
beach along both sides, one facing sunrise and the other sunset;
across the bay rises the hazy purple outline of Koh Pha Ngan. One
wonders how this breezy plot wasn’t snapped up years ago. The
suites—particularly the Ocean Front Haven villas, just off the
beach—are airy and spacious and cleverly laid out, with intuitive
tech that actually works, a living area that’s actually livable,
and an expansive plunge pool. Freestanding stone tubs and outdoor
showers are a plus, as are fire-engine-red Illy espresso makers.
The bright, mod, youthful vibe carries through to the public
areas, where funky amoeba chairs and an outsize Connect 4 game
play right into the W target demo. After dark the whole property
is lit in glow-stick hues of lime green and raspberry, and
although I’m typically skeptical of any hotel that thinks it’s a
nightclub, the W’s lobby- and beach-bar scenes stayed on the
right side of lively, and the music was not bad at all.

Both properties show a marked shift in style. Until very
recently, Thai resorts made nods to indigenous architecture and
design: witness the Four Seasons, built only five years ago, with
its pitched roofs, sala pavilions, and frangipani-shrouded prayer
houses, the embodiment of hotel-as-temple. Samui’s newer
breed—the Banyan Tree and the W, as well as the Conrad, Hansar,
and Gurich (formerly Langham Place) resorts—embrace the more
secular, urbane-contemporary aesthetic of Singapore and Hong
Kong. Their design draws not from the past but from some
idealized, pan-Asian future, where there’s nary a Buddhist
reliquary nor a bolt of Thai silk in sight. What they lack in
local character they make up for in comfort. No wonder few guests
go anywhere else.

But if people don’t leave the premises, are the hotels truly
bringing their guests to Samui, and bringing Samui to their
guests? Resorts here are increasingly removed from island life,
secreted in private jungles and coves like tropical Brigadoons.
The result is that there are now two Koh Samuis: the private and
the public, the luxe and the local. And it’s not clear how—or
even if—they fit together.

A more ambitious visitor might venture beyond his hotel gates to
see what homegrown charms Samui has to offer. He could take in a
kickboxing match or browse the stalls at a night market. He might
check out Baan Hua Thanon, a.k.a. “the Muslim Village,” with its
traditional wooden storefronts and racks of fish drying
picturesquely in the sun. He could visit Nathon’s
mid-19th-century Buddhist temple, then wander among the nearby
Chinese shop-houses, where cobblers sell shoes made of lizard,
stingray, or cobra skin.

More likely, he’ll wind up on Chaweng, Samui’s most popular
beach, where I’d stayed in 1993. Were he to stroll no farther
inland than the tide, he might imagine Chaweng to be quite lovely
indeed. But if he strayed past the sand he’d see what unbridled
tourist development can do to a place, and why any right-minded
person would flee from here as quickly as possible. Chaweng Beach
Road is an exhaust-choked corridor of tacky souvenir shops and
cut-rate tailors. (Should you wish, a store called Chaweng Armani
will fashion you a $250 tuxedo overnight.) After dark the strip
gives over to rowdy pubs, thumping discos, and go-go bars—a
wretched hive of scum and villainy where “lady boxing” is the
primary cultural entertainment. If there be paradise on earth, it
isn’t this, it isn’t this.

“If I could, I’d bring every guest in here by private boat,” said
the general manager of one luxury resort, located not far from
Chaweng. “The road from the airport to our hotel is just so
ugly—people are disappointed before they even check in.”

Such is the flip side of Samui’s success. Where once only hippie
backpackers roamed, now come British lager louts, Brazilian
ravers, Russian horndogs, Korean honeymooners, Australian
retirees, Swedish families, Indian moguls, Taiwanese spa junkies,
and Israeli scuba freaks. They come from all corners of the
earth, from all age groups and social milieus. The problem is
that each tribal set arrives with its own wish list, and its own
competing notion of what a tropical paradise should be. Paradise
for this guy might mean DJ’s and bottle service; paradise for
that guy is anywhere those things aren’t. On her side of
paradise: detox smoothies and qigong by the pool. On his side:
Jäger shots at a bar made out of ice. This side: fresh
dragonfruit and a pillow menu. That side: rolling yourself down a
hill inside a giant plastic ball. Some people think paradise
requires monkeys—but maybe you don’t like monkeys. Maybe
you once got chased by a coconut-tossing macaque.

For me paradise has to involve good food, by which I mean genuine
local cooking, not fussy conceptual cuisine. I’ve spent a lot of
time on the beaches of Southeast Asia, where too many restaurants
dish out fancy ingredients on plates that resemble Dale Chihuly
installations. I’ve endured enough foie-gras satay,
Wagyu-papaya salads, and langoustines served in martini glasses
to know that you seldom leave such places feeling good about your
meal or your soul.

Alas, Samui does a brisk business in Wagyu and foie gras, and has
more than its share of “creative-contemporary” restaurants. (One
is actually named Orgasmic.) Meanwhile, authentic southern Thai
food is frustratingly hard to come by. But I did find a gem of a
place on Bang Po Beach, on Samui’s northeastern coast.

Bang Po Seafood is a family-run shack with tables in the sand, a
sweet and gracious staff, and an extensive menu of (and I quote)
“seasonal local food,” which here means a spicy mango salad laced
with sea urchin; tiny baby octopus stir-fried with fish sauce,
garlic, ginger, and chiles; and a turmeric-dusted red snapper,
deep-fried to golden crispy goodness. Every table also gets
unlimited helpings of khoei jii, a most ingenious local
snack, made by pressing shrimp paste, crabmeat, coconut, garlic,
shallots, and chili into a thick, savory-sweet spread, smearing
it inside a dried coconut husk, then roasting said husk over a
flame. It comes with a crudité plate of sliced cucumbers and long
beans with which to scrape up the paste. Seriously? Most
delicious thing I ate on the island.

From my table I watched Thai families stroll along the tranquil
beach while brightly colored long-tail boats sputtered across the
water like buzzing insects. A few hundred yards offshore,
fishermen walked along a dormant reef, waist-deep, hunting for
squid. This, at last, was the Samui I’d been dreaming of, the one
I’d remembered from 1993. If only places like Bang Po Beach were
still the norm.

The more changes I encountered on Samui, the more I kept thinking
of another island in the Gulf of Thailand, similar in
geography, size, and physical beauty, but poised at the opposite
end of the continuum, its career just beginning instead of
halfway along. Phu Quoc, Vietnam—275 miles northeast of Koh
Samui—was a rustic frontier land, with 35,000 acres of primeval
forest ringed by a few modest villages and lovely stretches of
sand. On the beach, stray cows outnumbered sunbathers. Phu Quoc’s
market town was comically sleepy—you expected a tumbleweed to
roll across the intersection. There was a small airport, but the
majority of visitors—backpackers, mostly—came to Phu Quoc by
ferry.

Any of this sound familiar?

That somnolent Neverland inspired a lot of feelings, not least
the urge to protect it. Phu Quoc was like that fledgling band you
were lucky enough to catch in some half-empty club, still a bit
sloppy but bursting with promise. (Koh Samui in 2011 was the same
band playing a sold-out hockey arena, the crowd shouting along to
songs that once only you knew.)

But hold up. Step back. Let’s not project some antediluvian
fantasy onto an island that didn’t even have reliable
electricity. Phu Quoc had one decent hotel, but no great resorts.
It still doesn’t. Restaurants were scarce, as was refrigeration.
Yes, the island was unspoiled, but it was also sort of
uninteresting; beyond the market and a handful of fish-sauce
distilleries, Phu Quoc had few sights and attractions, such that
you could drive for miles along the coast and actually start to
feel, well, bored, for lack of anything else to do, see,
eat, buy, indulge in, or avoid. And those roads were atrocious:
dusty red tracks of pothole-riddled laterite. I recall a
bone-rattling ride from the airport to my hotel—in a stifling,
sweat-reeking relic of a van, my eyes and lungs filling up with
road dust—and remember thinking to myself, This is gonna be a
long week.

Flash-forward five years, and I’m whisked to the Banyan Tree
Samui in a sparkling air-con Mercedes, chilly as a
eucalyptus-scented towel, with gamelan music pinging out of the
MP3 player—a veritable spa on wheels. Few, honestly, could argue
with that. So what was it about Koh Samui now that vexed me, even
in the cosseting arms of a five-star resort? Why did it no longer
feel like the paradise I remembered from 18 years ago—when Phu
Quoc, for all its limitations, sort of did?

The difference, I think, has to do with the “blank slate” I
described earlier. Like Phu Quoc today, Koh Samui in 1993 had
been more or less an empty canvas, in terms of both its tourist
profile and its indigenous life. It was never, as I said, a
bastion of culture. Nor did most travelers need it to be. Indeed,
that empty canvas was sort of refreshing, like a deserted beach.
Yet as more and more visitors washed ashore, Samui’s blank slate
made it all the more susceptible to outside influence. In
contrast to, say, Bali—whose vibrant local traditions have always
defined the traveler’s experience, rather than vice versa—Samui
made few demands, culturally speaking, and allowed visitors to
define it as their own.

This is the issue with a tropical paradise: we need a
there there. Today’s traveler wants a convincing reason
to fly 24 hours to the other side of the planet—and sand and surf
alone aren’t it. Paradise can’t float untethered in a nameless
sea; it has to feel concrete, genuine, rooted in a culture and a
locale. The New Samui has a great many things—arguably too
many—but a strong sense of place is not one of them. On the New
Samui you can sip South African Chardonnay to the beat of a samba
remix while Japanese couples peruse the English menu and order
smoked-salmon pizza, and SkyNews shows the weekend forecast for
Minneapolis. You can do a lot of things on Samui, having a
perfectly good time, and rarely be reminded you’re in Thailand.

As the East Coast fills up with ever more sprawling hotels and
villa developments, some locals and expats are fleeing for
Samui’s rugged southwestern shore. Here it’s a whole different
island: slower-paced, more traditional—in a word, more Thai. The
fishing village of Baan Taling Ngam has even acquired a
burgeoning little bohemian community, who gather at the Five
Islands Gallery & Café, tucked inside an 80-year-old wooden
house.

Not surprisingly, developers have followed them here. Nikki
Beach, a Miami-style club-resort, has arrived just up the coast,
and a Conrad hotel is opening this fall. InterContinental will
soon relaunch the opulent Baan Taling Ngam resort (formerly run
by Le Royal Méridien). By the time the 90-villa Park Hyatt sets
up here in a few years, the “Virgin Coast” may look an awful lot
like the other side of the island.

Until then, it’s a fine place to escape the crowds. I spent a
peaceful afternoon at the Five Islands Café, sipping strong
coffee and sampling house-made ice creams, then drove up the
coast to watch the sunset from a near-deserted beach. I lingered
late into the evening, savoring the calm. Squid boats began to
appear on the darkening horizon, their bow lights glittering like
stars. On the hillside behind me, a dog barked, then all went
quiet again—until, from somewhere up the shore, came another,
noisier sound: the pulsing electro-beat of the Black-Eyed Peas.
Even here, it seemed, the world was rushing in.

So I gathered up my flip-flops and walked back to my car,
thinking it unlikely that a so-called island paradise could exist
in this age, what with the thousand rival factions descending on
each contender, all clamoring for a piece.

But who knows? Maybe I was wrong.

Maybe it was still out there somewhere—perhaps not so far from
where I stood.